Abroad in America: The Moment We’ve Been Waiting For

Welcome to The New York Times’s international election newsletter, where Sarah Lyall tries to explain the U.S. midterm elections to readers outside the United States (and perhaps to herself).

And now the moment we have been waiting for: Election Day! Which is actually not a moment at all, but an extended nationwide slog characterized, at least this time around, by hope, anxiety and possibly despair, depending on your point of view.

Here are some basics about what to watch for, and how to think about them, as the election unfolds.

What’s at Stake

Thirty-five seats in the Senate, 435 seats in the House of Representatives, the governorships of 39 states and territories, and hundreds of state offices.

What’s Also at Stake

A lot! Who gets to be the first female senator in Arizona history in a race where both candidates are women. Whether Georgia becomes the first state ever to elect an African-American woman governor. Whether Senator Ted Cruz, whom even his fellow Republicans do not like, but whose continued political presence they are depending on, can hang on to his seat in Texas. Maybe the future of the country.

President Trump, of course, sees the election as a personal referendum on himself. (“Pretend I’m on the ballot.”) Other Republicans see it as a chance to secure the country’s rightward shift under a president whose policies they broadly support.

And Democrats see an opportunity to demonstrate that “a president with this record and of this character can still be rebuked, repelled, and rejected, and, more importantly, so can his party,” the commentator Andrew Sullivan wrote recently. “We will see, in a tangible way, what America now is.”

What’s Not at Stake

The presidency itself! President Trump himself is not actually on the ballot, though the election will have meaningful consequences for him in his next two years in office.

How to Plan Your Night (and the Morning After)

First, make sure to stock up on coffee, tea, tequila or whatever keeps you going. It’s going to be a bumpy ride, and those of you in Europe and Asia will need to stay up very late (or get up very early) to start hearing the results in real time.

Second, keep in mind that each of the 50 states has its own rules on how and when and under what circumstances its citizens vote. Each state also opens and closes the polls according to its own cunning plan, though in most cases polls open at 6 a.m. to 8 a.m. local time and close about 12 hours later. Also, the United States is spread across six different time zones.

What this means is that the final results won’t be known until some indeterminate time that is much later than we want.

Read the Polls With Sophistication

The scenario we described last week — that the Democrats wrest the House from Republican control, while the Republicans hang on to the Senate — is still the most likely.

But Nate Cohn, who writes for The Times’s Upshot desk, cautions against drawing premature conclusions, saying that “two vastly different outcomes remain easy to imagine.”

Scenario one: The Democrats blow the Republicans out of the House and even threaten their Senate majority.

Scenario two: Nothing decisive happens and there is a “district-by-district battle for House control that lasts late on election night and perhaps for weeks after.”

Of Particular Interest Are Results in …

Kentucky The polls here close at 6 p.m. Eastern Time, or 11 p.m. U.T.C., so the results will start coming in on the early side. The race to watch is in the Sixth Congressional District, where Amy McGrath, a former Marine fighter pilot, is attempting to unseat the Republican incumbent, Representative Andy Barr. The state usually runs Republican but the polls are very close, and a win for Ms. McGrath might be a harbinger of further turns toward the Democrats as the night unfolds.

Georgia and Florida Both of the Republican candidates for governor in these states are white, Trump-esque and male, and both are fighting close races against charismatic African-American Democrats who have attracted vast amounts of out-of-state attention and money.

It’s going to be tight. Stacey Abrams, the Democratic former minority leader of the Georgia House of Representatives, has consistently trailed in the polls against Brian Kemp, the Republican Secretary of State, but the margins are small. (Mr. Kemp’s department runs voting in the state, and he has been repeatedly accused of suppressing votes in a way that disproportionately affects minorities.)

In Florida, Andrew Gillum, the Democratic mayor of Tallahassee, is polling slightly ahead of the former Representative Ron DeSantis, a Republican who made some bad missteps in the campaign that have not been overridden by the aggressive support of President Trump.

A loss here would make the president extremely angry.

Virginia The state as a whole is considered as a bit of a harbinger, as a number of House seats held by Republican incumbents — elected in the Trump-led wave of 2016 — look vulnerable.

“Of all the early close states, Virginia is likely to tell us the most about the direction of the evening, at least where the House of Representatives is concerned,” NBC News is predicting. The polls close at 7 p.m.Eastern Time, or midnight U.T.C.

And Ballot Measures There has been a lot of chatter in this election about how the redistricting process — the process by which the boundaries of state voting districts are redrawn following the national census — is a recipe for abuse by whichever party happens to be in charge at the time, leading to the noxious practice of gerrymandering.

Four states — Ohio, Michigan, Missouri and Utah — are voting for measures intended to reform this process by making it less susceptible to partisan vicissitudes. It’s only four states, but still.

How to Follow Along

The Times will be providing round-the-clock coverage of the whole thing — polls, results, on-the-ground reporting, analysis analysis analysis — and we are suspending our paywall for the duration of the election, until Thursday morning E.S.T, if you log in or register. So fire up your computer! The time has come.

Image

When’s the Next Election, Anyway?

“We view events in the U.S.A. with amazement and concern. In any European democracy, a person like Trump would have been removed from office by parliament.” — John Strating, Netherlands

“Donald Trump has brought out the worst in the U.S. and is leading the country towards disaster. I hope the Democrats win both houses of Congress in the upcoming election and the Republicans turf him from the ticket in 2020.” — Sheila Dropkin, New Yorker living in Canada

When I covered the U.K. for The Times, I was always struck by what seemed to be the instability of the European-style parliamentary model, which seemed to make it so easy for parties to turn on their leaders. Governments kept toppling. It felt provisional and precarious.

No system is perfect, and I still don’t know which I prefer. But a great benefit of the parliamentary system is that it makes it harder for a country to fall under the sway of a particular person. Former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher surely attracted a kind of cult following. But when her party had had enough, it got rid of her. She was never bigger than the country she led.

There are no similar mechanisms in the U.S. system. As we discussed here a week or two ago, it’s very hard to remove a president from office by impeachment. The other method — in which the vice president and majority of the Cabinet invoke Section IV of the 25th Amendment of the Constitution and declare that the president is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office” — has never been attempted.

That leaves us with regularly scheduled elections. So, for those people who love the electoral process and are wistful that this eventful midterm season is coming to a close, or who are suffused by fear about what will happen next, do not worry! The next election is just two years away.

Image

Sarah signs in to vote this morning.CreditHolly Pickett for The New York Times

Taking a Different Approach

Following the tradition under which past presidents refrain from publicly criticizing their successors, Former President Barack Obama has kept a low political profile the past two years.

That’s changed in recent months, as he has been aggressively campaigning on behalf of Democratic candidates, and against Mr. Trump and his policies.

Mr. Obama has done his share of ridiculing and throwing shade at Mr. Trump, but as the bruising midterm season winds down, it is clear that the two men have fundamentally different approaches to the business of campaigning.

In his many rallies, Mr. Trump has been sneeringly referring to Mr. Obama as “Barack H. Obama” — H is for Hussein, with all that the word implies when the president uses it. He has also been pushing hard on immigration (message: it is out of control) and the economy (message: it is better than ever) while warning that the country should not allow the House to fall into Democratic hands.

In Chicago over the weekend, Mr. Obama urged the country to believe in “the abiding spirit of the American people.”

“Goodness and decency is still out there,” he said. “Kindness is still out there. Generosity is still out there. Hope is still out there. We just have to stand up and speak for it.”

CLARIFICATION: Last Friday’s newsletter said that Senator Robert Menendez, a New Jersey Democrat who is in a tough re-election fight, had been found “guilty” of multiple ethical violations. While Mr. Menendez was “severely admonished” by the Senate for violating rules on accepting gifts and other offenses, he hasnot been found guilty in a court of law; a criminal case ended in a hung jury, and the remaining charges were dismissed.